Chasing Perfection: 1000 Miles in the McLaren MP4-12C

Getting comfortable with the supercar for obsessive personalities.

McLaren drivers are especially unlikely to have anyone tailgating them due to the 3.8-liter’s incredible output. Unless they’re driving the Blue Flame, tailgaters quickly fade to distant dots. Between the warp-drive thrust and parachute braking, it’s easy to immediately adjust your speed so that you pass all highway signs at a velocity matching the road’s number. Crack a window, and the gasping, hiccupping, hissing turbos will have you thinking you’re driving a gnarly drag-strip bruiser. Actually, you are: A 10.7-second quarter-mile at 134 mph will get plenty of respect at the Wednesday-night test-and-tune.

Perfection is an uncompromising concept, and while the MP4-12C might be clos­er than anything we’ve ever driven, it isn’t quite there. The name, for one, is cumbersome. We just told people it was a McLaren, because if we had said it was a McLaren MP4-12C, we would have sounded like pompous twerps who’d memorized the car’s VIN. The paddle-shifted dual-clutch transmission occasionally disappoints with drawn-out or poorly timed shifts, and the paddles themselves lack the crisp feel of many competitors’. And in an age when supercars are finally becoming somewhat dependable, a few aspects of the car felt disappointingly cheap. The HVAC fan sounds like it’s chewing on its bearings; the infotainment system, disabled in the last car we tested, was in this example sporadically not fully abled; and the lightweight doors do not like to close tightly, frequently requiring a second (or third) unsettlingly aggressive slam to finally latch. Small concerns, but questions about build quality of minor parts fuel nagging doubts about major systems.

The greatest hurdle to everyday usability is that, unlike offerings from Lamborghini and Porsche, the McLaren has no means of lifting its nose over speed bumps and during severe transitions. Using every last inch on two-lane roads to angle over larger speed bumps, we couldn’t always avoid scraping the car’s chin. Thankfully, the McLaren’s less ostentatious (some would say cottage-industry) styling isn’t as likely to ignite furious jealousy in onlookers, and traffic gave us room. The comparatively demure look might be ideal for a daily-use supercar. Car people notice it and others don’t. It does elicit strange responses from some people, though, such as the guy in a Nissan Versa who, upon seeing the McLaren in his rearview mirror, accelerated to 115 mph and maintained that speed for many miles. Passing would have been easy (at that speed, 150 is only about five seconds away), but we so admired his enthusiasm that we backed off.

Speed is the greatest danger of driving a car like this daily. You can double the speed limit just about anywhere without endangering anything but your license. On remote roads with no traffic, there’s no apparent reason to ever slow down. But if you drive flat-out all the time, either the law or the laws of physics eventually catch up with you.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the McLaren’s usability is that, with its comfortable ride and subdued engine note, it lets you forget you’re in a supercar. Forgetting seems like a shame, but it’s necessary if you want to drive something like this every day—and you do want to. Because when nobody’s looking, you can get just as raunchy as yesteryear’s prom queen after a second divorce and a few drinks. McLaren’s prom queen will not only get as wild as anyone’s, but she’s just as happy turning it off for civilized school-board meetings and quiet nights watching Puss in Boots (the DreamWorks one) with the kids. A lady on the street but a freak in the bed—isn’t that The New American Dream? It’s ours.